Donors

On May 14, 2008, The Perl Foundation received a philanthropic donation of US$200,000 from Ian Hague. Mr. Hague is a co-founder of Firebird Management LLC, a financial fund management company based in New York City. This donation was the result of extensive discussions between Mr. Hague, The Perl Foundation and a Perl community member who wishes to remain anonymous.

The purpose of the donation is to support the development of Perl 6, the next generation of the Perl programming language. Roughly half of the funds will be used to support Perl 6 developers through grants and other means. The balance of the funds will be used by The Perl Foundation to develop its own organizational capabilities. This will allow The Perl Foundation to pursue additional funding opportunities to support Perl 6 development. Mr. Hague wants his contribution to be seed funding in that effort.

The Perl Foundation thanks Mr. Hague in the deepest possible terms. This donation is unprecedented in its generosity, scope and vision, and it is precisely what was needed at this junction in the development of Perl 6. We look forward to the greatest of successes with Perl 6, and this contribution is a key part of making that happen. The Perl Foundation will communicate further developments with the Perl community and Mr. Hague as the pieces of this plan are executed.

At the Oslo QA Hackathon 2008, during one evening meal, it became evident that Jonathan Worthington would be able to spend even more time hacking on Rakudo Perl if he would get paid a little money for it. As Vienna.pm still has some money earmarked for Perl development, we encouraged Jonathan to send us a proposal for funding him. Which he did. And which we accepted.

So starting next week, Jonathan will work on Rakudo one full day a week (minimum of 8 hours of work), post about the work on the rakudo.org blog / use.perl.org. He will recieve € 150 per day spend working on Rakudo. We estimate that on average he will work 4 days per month. We agreed on funding three months (~ €1,800) and evalute the grant after that time. If everybody is happy, we will continue the grant until the end of 2008, where we will evaluate again (and check if we still have money left).

It is with great pleasure that The Perl Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announce a major new Perl 6 Development Grant. The recipient of the grant is Patrick Michaud, the Perl 6 compiler pumpking and lead programmer of a Perl 6 implementation based on Parrot and on his own work on the Perl 6 compiler and grammar. The grant will provide Patrick with four months of support for this work beginning November 1, 2007. Patrick will receive US$15,000 over this time, with $10,000 of the funding coming from Mozilla Foundation and $5,000 from The Perl Foundation.

The goals for this development grant are:

To have a Perl 6 on Parrot implementation that supports commonly-used Perl 6 constructs;

Improvements to the Perl 6 test suite;

To substantially complete the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, including documentation;

Increased community participation in Perl 6 and Parrot development, including development efforts on other languages utilizing Parrot and the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.

In order to ensure the proper management and progress for this grant TPF asked Jesse Vincent to be the Grant Manager. Jesse has graciously accepted this volunteer position. Jesse is a noted Perl community member and he has worked as the Perl 6 project manager for the past several years. Additionally, he (through his company, Best Practical Solutions) has supported the Perl 6 effort through a series of microgrants.

In 2005, the Perl Foundation asked NLNet, a Dutch foundation, for a grant to fund long-term work on Parrot, with the goal of getting Parrot to 1.0 release. The grant was divided into four milestones. In April of 2005, NLNet agreed to provide $70,000 worth of funding to the Perl Foundation for the first two milestones of this grant, $35,000 per milestone.

The grant's structure was slightly modified in Fall of 2007 in order to add more subsystems, and to remove the start and end of milestone payments.